Muppets Now

TV Series Review

The Muppets are as diverse a cast as you could conceive. They’ve got frogs, pigs, bears, dogs, chickens, people, rats, eagles, sheep and an array of undefinable critters on staff. But oddly, they have very few cats.

It’s a big omission when you think about it. Because the Muppets have had at least nine lives.

Jim Henson’s creations have had more reboots than Fozzie has groaners, than Piggy has sequins, than Kermit has ulcers. No longer do they simply sing and dance on The Muppet Show, a family fave that first debuted in 1976. They’ve gone high tech (again), pushing their talents online in what looks like a highly segmented series of YouTube vids. (Disney+ apparently picked up this package of streaming segments and made it exclusive to its own streaming service, as Disney is wont to do.)

The results? Like a dish from the Swedish Chef, this new iteration scores high on enthusiasm, but falls short on taste.

Why Don’t You Get Things Started?

Let’s take a cue from Wayne and Wanda, two singing pigs from the old Muppet Show, and hit the high notes first.

One, it’s great to see the Muppets back, and close to the form that made them so popular in the first place. It’s a welcome correction to The Muppets, a short-lived 2015 ABC sitcom that envisioned Piggy and Kermit as divorced, Fozzie struggling with an interspecies relationship and everyone dealing with their own Muppetized version of rather adult trauma and angst. Executive producer Bob Kushell told Entertainment Weekly in 2015 that The Muppets was about the “relationship-driven, emotional stories that people go through in their personal lives. Everyone in this version of the Muppets wants to push them further in a way they’ve never seen before.”

Well, that grittier, more risqué version went over about as well as a piccolo solo by Animal, which brings us back to Muppets Now. Gone are the satirical hard edges and the wink-wink risqué punchlines that the ABC show wallowed in. The new show is funny. It’s stocked with the requisite array of guest stars (who always seem to look like they’re having loads of fun with their felt hosts). And in some ways, it feels like a return to the Muppets’ more innocent past.

And yet in others, it’s not so innocent at all.

Wacka-Wacka-What?

Let’s not kid ourselves. The Muppets—even in its cleanest of days—would’ve never gotten a completely clean bill of health from Plugged In. The crew’s penchant for wanton slapstick violence would’ve always gotten a mention or two from us. Miss Piggy alone has beaten up more characters in her career than John Wick. (And indeed, in the new show’s very first episode, Miss Piggy takes down a skin therapist who treats Piggy with a cutting-edge face-slapping massage.) Romance has always been a part of the Muppets’ back-scenes shenanigans, and the show has never been completely absent of more adult-oriented asides.

But I think it’s fair to say that the new Muppets Now comes, like a closeup of the bags under Waldorf’s eyes, with some unsightly wrinkles.

Uncle Deadly (a longtime cast member who came to prominence in the 2011 movie The Muppets) serves again (as he did in the ABC series) as Miss Piggy’s personal assistant and rather stereotypically effeminate confidante. He’s joined by a pig named Howard, who knows everything there is to know about guest star RuPaul (who, of course, is perhaps the most famous drag queen in the land). As Decider’s Brett White writes, these two characters are “as funny as they are gay, gay, gay.” And while they do indeed say some funny things, many Christian families will likely find them less so.

Their presence here—along with the fact that RuPaul guest stars on the show’s very first episode—feels like a statement by Muppets Now’s makers. The show feels as self-consciously inclusive as children’s programming gets. And while it’s hardly alone in the television landscape today in that regard, the fact that it’s a part of a franchise whose essential character goes back 50-plus years, it’s significant.

As mentioned earlier, the Muppets have always been—thanks to their multicolored, multi-specied cast—as diverse as they come. So perhaps none of this should be too surprising, especially in the era in which we live. It’s an overtly secular continuation of the franchise’s optimistic, all-welcoming vibe; a rainbow connection, if you will.

And we’re grateful that Muppets Now punts the risqué humor and adult angst of some of its more recent incarnations. But while this new Muppets show feels like it was made more for kids, that doesn’t mean it’s agenda-free, or that it’s necessarily made for your kids.